Tag: Dan Hardy

(Nothing to see here but me yappin’ with Steve Cofield and Dave Farra about how to lose money most efficiently at UFC 111.)

For those of you lucky enough to snag tickets to UFC 111 before they sold out, you get to play an entirely different kind of betting game in Newark, New Jersey on Saturday night. We like to call it, ‘Mugged or Propositioned?’ It’s simple, really. You try and guess whether you will be mugged, or offered drugs and/or the services of a prostitute. Both are bound to happen eventually, but the key is to peg which one will happen first. You don’t win anything if you guess right. That’s why this game sucks.

Whether you’re putting together a fight poster or the cover of Teen Vogue, airbrushing is just something you do. I mean, you didn’t think Georges St. Pierre‘s cheekbones were really that breathtaking, did you? But UFC 111 is the first time in recent memory that a fighter’s tattoos have been airbrushed out. Above you see one version of the UFC 111 poster featuring Dan Hardy‘s Sanskrit tattoo of a Tibetan Buddhist prayer, and another version with his stomach looking as clean as the belly of a starless Sneetch. So what gives?

In case you missed it, here’s last night’s installment of Spike’s UFC Primetime hype-series, which opens in a Long Island Hooters, where Dan Hardy can somehow smell Georges St. Pierre‘s fear over the pungent aroma of hot wings and urinal cakes. Hardy has come out to New York early to get acclimated with the time zone and funny accents of the American East Coast. Acting as his spirit guide is former UFC welterweight champ Matt Serra, who is helping Hardy work on the positions that he’ll surely be placed in against GSP, and lending him some of his lovable underdog magic. Back in Montreal, we learn a little more about Tristar Gym trainer Firas Zahabi, his obsessive work ethic, and his cute wife. Nate Marquardt and Kenny Florian stop by to add some star power to St. Pierre’s camp. (Ferrum Ferro Acuitur, bro.) Our buddies Ariel Helwani and Randy Gordon interview Hardy about training with monks; turns out Hardy really is a martial artist, even if he doesn’t walk out to the Octagon in his pajamas. Part 2 is after the jump. Give it a look before it’s pulled…

Now this is more like it. Dan Hardy and Georges St. Pierre alone might lend themselves too easily to pre-packaged storylines, but Matt Serra is a born freakin’ entertainer over here. This clip is forty seconds long and still he manages to do/say more interesting things than either Hardy or GSP managed in the entirety of the first episode. You gotta love the guy for that. It’s almost enough to make me want to watch this one live instead of on my DVR tomorrow morning while eating leftover Chinese food and nursing a severe hangover. Almost.

Just in case this short clip isn’t enough entertainment to make the afternoon pass more swiftly, follow me after the jump for some totally gratuitous old school Wanderlei Silva ass-kicking action. There’s no real reason for it. Except that it’s awesome.

The UFC’s latest “Primetime” series premiered on Spike TV Wednesday night, whereupon we learned that Dan Hardy is a mouthy British punk and Georges St. Pierre is a determined, focused professional athlete. If that sounds like an oversimplification of the matter, that’s because it is. It’s also the angle that “Primetime” spent the better part of a half-hour hammering into our skulls.

The good news is the show garnered an average audience of about one million people, making it the most-watched episode since the series began with the GSP-BJ Penn showdown in January of 2009. In terms of cold hard numbers and objective reality, the newest incarnation of the show would appear to be a success. When it comes to telling us anything new about the fighters, and avoiding the empty phrases and broad stroke storytelling that is so often the worst part of fight-hyping TV shows, there’s nothing spectacular here.

Rememer the "UFC Primetime" series that premieres tonight? Well, in a continued effort to generate buzz before the first episode, the UFC has put out a couple clips of what they’re calling "unseen moments" from the show. Of course, they’re not at all unseen now that the UFC has put them on their official YouTube page, but you get the point. It’s footage they weren’t going to use anyway, and it’s supposed to make you want to watch the show, which is in turn supposed to make you want to buy the UFC 111 pay-per-view or pay $25 to see it at a movie theater.

Trouble is, this stuff is painfully boring. We’re talking Jim Jarmusch levels of boring here. As in, a two-minute clip of Georges St. Pierre talking about a bet he made with a friend for really uninteresting stakes, followed by him calling that friend and discussing those uninteresting stakes all over again. We realize it’s throwaway footage, but damn. I’m supposed to bump "16 and Pregnant" off my DVR queue for this?

After the jump, GSP does some push-ups and drills and stuff. It’s exactly as interesting as that sentence makes it sound.

The welterweight title fight between Georges St. Pierre and Dan Hardy headlines this month’s UFC 111 card (March 27th, Newark), and both fighters will be featured in a new three-part weekly UFC Primetime special which kicks off tonight at 10 p.m. ET/PT on Spike. The UFC hasn’t put together a Primetime show since January 2009, when BJ Penn vowed to go "to the death." Hardy probably won’t get that dramatic with his trash-talk, but he will be landing his shots:

“I know that I can give GSP hell when the times come. It’s so sweet stepping out into the Octagon on the other side saying, ‘I told you so.’…All these GSP fans that are betting the house on him, when they wake up Sunday morning…they aren’t going to be too impressed with themselves.”

Primetime gives viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the fighters’ training camps — from Hardy’s Rough House team in Nottingham to St. Pierre’s home base in Montreal — as well as their personal lives. To promote it, the UFC’s YouTube account has posted a very short clip of GSP jumping over a bar. Hmm. Well, I wasn’t planning on spending $45 to watch Georges beat the crap out of a +500 underdog, but now? Now you’ve got my attention.

(At least he’s got a sense of humor. That’s the second best thing to have in a fight with GSP. The first? Excellent takedown defense.)

At this point, we have to assume that Dan Hardy knows he won’t be the fan favorite heading into his title fight with Georges St. Pierre at UFC 111. As a 5-1 underdog, he won’t be the betting favorite either, but that doesn’t mean he can’t still have a little fun. The problem is, there’s really not that much trash you can talk to GSP. Not only are there very few evident weaknesses in his game, but as a person he’s almost painfully non-offensive (unless you happen to be B.J. Penn). So what does Hardy do? He goes after the people who say he hasn’t earned his shot at the champ. Fortunately for him, there is no shortage of them.

When you really think about it, that’s a tough one. Getting hit by a car doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as being killed by a car, so there’s that. But if we assume that Davis would also wish for Hardy to die of his injuries, what then? At least someone who gets AIDS has a chance to say goodbye to their family and gain a new perspective on the circle of life and other such bullshit before they pass. The person killed by a speeding Audi doesn’t ever get the opportunity to set his past wrongs right. Then again, he also doesn’t have to suffer in hospital rooms or get all weak and lesion-y like Tom Hanks in "Philadelphia."

And thus has a man nicknamed “The Irish Hand Grenade” plunged us into a philosophical quandary with a couple of garbled sentences. Really makes you wonder what Jean-Paul Sartre could have accomplished if he had lived to Twitter.

Yeah, that’s Marcus Davis on Twitter, publicly stating that he hopes Dan Hardy dies of AIDS. And yes, it does appear to be his official Twitter account and not a fake. He has over 10,000 followers, links to his official website, mentions biographically correct information about himself from time to time, misspells a few words but not so many that it could be an attempt at humor, and for the most part remains just as tedious as most MMA fighters on Twitter. In other words, if it’s a fake the guy has been playing it really cool up until now. If that was all a ruse just to make this one AIDS comment and blow his cover, we’re going to have to say that he just wasted a lot of time.

The comment was made in response to a fan (BIGfield948, who we assume is still pissed that Bigfield69 was taken) after he expressed a desire to see Davis/Hardy II in the U.K. The missive you see above is Davis’s response, so it’s not as if this was taken somehow out of context. The question is, if we accept that this is really Marcus Davis and he really did say that he hopes Hardy dies of AIDS, what conclusions can we jump to in an irresponsible, reactionary fashion?